Google Search Result & Algorithmic Update for Week 1, December 2011

New 10 Point Algorithmic Update To Enhances User Experience

Google has struck again with another change to improve search algorithms, indexing and query refinements all aimed at refining and enhancing the user experience by helping find exactly what one is looking for. The new set of algorithms will incorporate a new ranking signal for determining original content, indexing content deeper to find more long tail content, indexing freshest images and indexing blog posts faster. Google has also announced that there will be near-daily changes being made to the algorithms and features enhancements over the next few days.

The list of the 10 new updates are as follows:

New Signals & Classifiers:

Original content: Google has come good with a new set of signals that would differentiate original content and give it more authority between two pages of similar content.

New "parked domain" classifier: There has also been a new algorithm change that would automatically detect parked domains which are simply placeholder sites that are seldom useful and are filled with ads with very little content. As these sites don’t have valuable content for users, Google has decided not to show them in the search results.

Image result freshness: The new algorithms have also been incorporated in Google Images and from now on, images will show up on the basis of freshness quotient for news queries which means users will get to see the latest and freshest images more often.

Changes in Indexing:

More comprehensive indexing: In order to narrow down a search query to the best possible result, Google has made available the use of long-tail documents in its indexing, and so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.

Fresher and more complete blog search results: The blog search index gets more coverage that is both fresher and more comprehensive.

Changes in Search Results:

Related query results refinements: Google, which has been tuned to fetch results for queries that are similar to the actual search query would from now on make it less likely for results related to the search query to show up and only the original query will rank high. For example, if you are searching for [extra large T-shirts], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions "large T-shirts."

Top result selection code rewrite: The selection code rewrite would handle extra processing on the top set of results by ensuring that too many results from one site don’t show up.

More auto-complete predictions: By making prediction algorithm a little more flexible for certain queries, Google search autocomplete option would strike a fine balance between coming up with flexible predictions while remaining true to user intentions.

Live results for Major League Soccer and the Canadian Football League: With live display of the latest scores & schedules from these leagues along with quick access to game recaps and box scores, it could be one big boost for soccer and football fans.

Layout on tablets: Some minor color and layout changes have been added to Google products across the range to enhance usability on tablet devices.